Restoring a lot of accounts

[optize]

Today we had to do a full restore of a cPanel box for the first time. I was very surprised to see how slow cPanel restores took, it took roughly 11 hours to restore 180 accounts (200gig total)

I'm concerned that our bigger machines (800+ accounts) would take days to restore. Given those servers are much faster then the 180 account one, it will still take a long time. I don't know of a way to tell a customer 'hey, your site will be offline for atleast the next 24 hours, sorry'

So -- I want to hear ideas. Yes, I'm aware of R1, I don't trust it. What do you guys use for restores?

[cPanelTristan]

Was the old box entirely offline? If not, you can also consider an rsync to a new machine. An rsync is likely the fastest possible method to copy accounts to a new server in the event the old machine is having hard drive or other issues (but still online). I previously did a post (via a non-staff account at the time) about how to perform an rsync:

http://forums.cpanel.net/f5/rsync-ba...tml#post671150

Any other method such as a restore or off server backup is going to take awhile due to either extracting or copying the data.